VIA KT266 Socket-A DDR Chipset: Third time's a charm?

Memory Bandwidth - SiSoft Sandra 2001

Sandra 2001 uses the STREAM benchmark core for its memory bandwidth tests, arguably one of the only truly useful benchmarks from the suite.  The reasons the Sandra memory bandwidth results are so useful is because they are a combination of raw memory bandwidth performance and real world usage patterns since there is a significant amount of data manipulation occurring that results in the scores produced, instead of a raw read and write performance measurement. 

Since it is rare that you only read or write data without any sort of manipulation of it, this is a more realistic benchmark, although it is still a synthetic performance measurement utility.

Again, we see the KT266 with PC2100 DDR SDRAM, coming in below the MAGiK1 and AMD 760 and in this case, even the KT133A in terms of memory bandwidth.  The difference between the KT133A and KT266 isn't great, however you would expect it to be much larger and in favor of the KT266, not the other way around.

One thing that you do have to take into consideration is that the KT133A chipset is closely based on the KT133 core that has been around for close to a year now, while the KT266 is using a brand new memory controller from VIA. 

The FPU STREAM test from Sandra uses a dataset that is twice the size (FPU calculations are generally more memory bandwidth intensive b/c of larger datasets), thus increasing the dependency of the test on memory bandwidth performance resulting in higher figures in the above chart. 

Because of the larger focus on memory bandwidth, even the matured KT133A chipset must fall back and make room for the KT266 with PC2100 DDR SDRAM however it still offers less bandwidth than the AMD 760 and ALi MAGiK1 solutions.